Posts tagged "digital"

I’ve been sitting here waiting to type this blog for about twenty minutes, trying to decide what to write about the launch of eBee.

I could mention the guerrilla marketing at the digital marketing awards.

I could mention that it was a night of firsts for me – first company I’ve launched, first time I’ve ever used spray paint, first time I’ve been asked to remove it.

I could tell you about all the people who have  made this possible: clients, patients, a team of inspirational, passionate individuals and the 5 months spent pre launch collecting amazing technologies to play with and developing the technical development capacity to make them work for brands.

I could tell you how lucky I feel to have been asked by the founders of Hive (the mothership) to turn a business concept founded on ‘borrowing’ innovation from other industries, making it healthcare relevant and turning them into reality.

But instead I’ll just invite you to visit and you can decide what you’d like to know for yourself

As Helen and I drove down the M6 in the rain yesterday, something struck me…..

In 1996, I travelled – I had no email, no mobile phone – my family got a postcard every couple of weeks

In 1997, I started at university – they gave us a clunky email that resembled an MS-DOS screen – we thought it was great

In 2000, I did a PGCE – for the first time I used the internet for research – my paper on health education for behaviour change was largely in debt to online publications

Here we are in 2009, not a huge number of years later, and Helen and I were driving down the M6 after meeting the Head of the Pharmacy School at Keele University. What he showed us was mind blowing!

They have developed the virtual patient – an avatar called Shirley who walks up to the pharmacy counter, coughs, snuffles and waits for you to start the conversation. Depending on what you, as the pharmacist, chose to say or do, Shirley will respond. The prototype is using text input, but the future masterpiece version will use voice recognition.  It’s ingenious and totally captivating!

The consultation scenario that Shirley demonstrates is based on a decision tree algorithm – an interlinking set of questions, answers and decision points that dictate what Shirley will say and do. These algorithms are incredibly complex to build, we know, because we have just completed our first set for the alli launch that has been used to train pharmacists across the land. We’re very proud of the work we’ve done so far, but I can’t help wanting to take scenario training to the next level.

My friend Kate sat in my kitchen looking through a pile of papers. Then she laughed a short, scornful laugh:

“Wikipedia? Why would you print anything off Wikipedia?”

Silence.  A loose ball of cat hair tumbleweeded past.

I stirred the tea and hung my head. Why can’t I get into good debate with Kate? She makes me feel dumb. Nevertheless, I had to talk to someone about my thoughts on Wikipedia.

Unlike a real life Encyclopedia you need two hands to carry, Wikipedia is generated and edited by its users. There’s an article for just about every search term out there, and it’s often the first link on the search results page.

What came first, Wikipedia’s popularity or its accessibility?

Anyway, thousands of iterations by users shape a package of apparently relevant, well structured content, updated into real time. But with any piece of information plucked from the net, you should fact check your finds against your own research.  

For very casual research, I don’t have a problem with Wikipedia. It is fairly obvious to see which content has been approved by a substantial body of readers. And we know that scientific rigour is based in sample size. 2 approvals – not very rigorous, 200 approvals – much better. However, it’s true that we don’t know what these people are agreeing upon. I have never really checked out the references (not called references but “Notes” – suspicious).

Obviously Wikipedia was never made to fly with academia. There is also this satirist who calls Wikipedia an example of “truthiness” – the repurposing of “gut feeling” as equivalent to hard evidence.

Then again, Wikipedia is a soft target because it’s such an annoying buzzword. It’s high street, common, unfashionable. It’s in the distressing realm of the hyper-real (Wiki isn’t a real word). It symbolises our separation from what we were… think of the massive encyclopedia clutched to the chest with tiny child hands…the effort of finding the page we wanted.

But it should be fashionable for at least a couple of reasons – it’s free, it doesn’t make any money, it’s community-led.

People wanna get their facts straight!

Sermo is a social networking site we have been following here for a little while. It’s bloody successful – 3,000,000 comments, 30,000 discussions and the largest physicians only network with around 50,000 members.  Sermo continuously reinforces its value proposition, making its community secure, more user friendly and in-line with its stated goals and vision.

The Sermo community has had a few tests over the last 8 months or so – each time with naysayers being promptly being put into place by the community. From my old politics days – it was one of the fundamentals of sovereignty that a state provides for its members during peace time and expects those members to look after it when under attack. Perhaps this tenant of nation state theory can be stretched online? I hope so – it make 3 years of my life less of a waste of time!

Initially pharma’s role in this community was seen as something to be defended against. CEO and founder of Sermo Daniel Palestrant stated in an interview with (the ridiculously named) New Paradigm; “As a doctor I thought that other doctors were tired with interacting with Pharma…then we started having more and more members of the community saying, “Hey, where’s Pharma… why aren’t they in the system?”.

Sermo sought further input asking – “Do we want Pharma in here? The result – between 60% – 80% of the community felt a need for Pharma involvement somehow.” This feedback has been taken to heart and given rise to a recent announcement a partnership with Pfizer. Reading this made me feel warm about the benefits of online communities and the requirement physicians have for us lot to be involved.

Children with chronic disease often fail to adhere to prescribed treatment regimens, especially self-administered treatments. This is a significant challenge to overcome. Several cognitive and motivational processes are thought to influence adherence, including: (i) knowledge about the therapy and its relationship to health; (ii) perceptions of one’s ability to influence health outcomes (perceived control); and (iii) confidence in one’s ability to meet the demands of treatment and recovery (self-efficacy). This is true of both children and adults, although the specific barriers to adherence most likely differ depending on age. Children-specific interventions to improve adherence, in my experience, fail to engage. And engagement is a necessary component of effectiveness.
Therefore, I was pleasantly surprised when I stumbled across Re-Mission, a computer game designed to improve adherence to self-administered chemotherapy in children with cancer. In the game, players control a tiny robot, called ‘Roxxi’ (strangely attractive, see picture) within the body of a young cancer patient – the objective is to ensure that the virtual patients engage in self-care behaviours, such as taking oral chemotherapy to combat the cancer cells, taking antibiotics to fight infection, using relaxation techniques to reduce stress, and eating food to gain energy. The game is very playable, and there’s something intrinsically therapeutic about blasting the crap out of a malignant cancer cell, even for me

I know what the cynical among you are thinking, because I thought it to. Gimmick. And that’s why I was especially pleased to learn that Re-Mission had been evaluated in a peer-reviewed journal, and that the evaluation is positive. The conclusion? “The video-game intervention significantly improved treatment adherence and indicators of cancer-related self-efficacy and knowledge in adolescents and young adults who were undergoing cancer therapy. The findings support current efforts to develop effective video-game interventions for education and training in health care.“

I have been ‘doing’ billable healthcare digital for 14 years. In the beginning there were video presentations, online Q&A sessions and clinical summary downloads; more recently, a wealth of Flash-enabled tools. To date it’s been pretty easy to repurpose content or repackage it as a digital thing and sell it as exactly that – a thing, a tactical item, a separate channel for delivering traditional content. “A better mousetrap” as Ian would say.

The digital gold rush has produced an interesting response in the healthcare agency world. First, we have learned to bolt Shockwave Flash capability onto an existing production function. We expanded our in-house capability to do this, or outsourced to those talented Shockwave Flash savvy freelancers/e-lancers available locally or globally.

The second reaction is more radical. Agencies have been set up to focus purely on the digital channel, merging a healthcare marketing background with the ability to talk to internal and external audiences entirely through online means.

We’re responding to the rise of what we know as web 2.0 (every evolution must be named!). The success of brands such as Google, Facebook, eBay, YouTube have forced the agency world to find ways of incorporating the Web 2.0 experience into our healthcare approach. It appears no longer acceptable to consider “digital” as remote from the strategic process, interactive paper that crops up when useful. We must use its real advantages: to assist brands not only with functional delivery, but emotional answers and even a service offer.

It strikes me that an uptake of “real digital” in healthcare, and the correct use of its communication opportunities, calls for agencies to evolve and not necessarily clients. For years I sat with numerous agencies and moaned about the slow adoption of digital in healthcare. Over time I started to see how the digital evolution meant an entirely new strategic process. Forget the production bolt-ons, our work now is a total re-think from the earliest stages of brand planning. That’s when we will see brand values such as ‘community building’ being agreed on and more importantly, delivered.